IEEE 1003.26-2003 PDF
This standard defines extensions to POSIX.1 {2} to support application portability at the source-code level. It is intended to be used by both application developers and system implementers. The scope of this standard is to define a portable application interface for applications with realtime constraints requiring the ability to control special devices from the application itself. The intent is to take existing realtime operating system practice and add it to the POSIX family of standards. Specifically within the scope is to define interfaces which do not preclude high-performance implementations on traditional uniprocessor realtime systems, as well as on multiprocessors. Wherever possible, the requirements of other application environments were included in the interface definition.
Realtime systems often contain numerous special devices, many of which are accessed through device drivers. The purpose of this project is to define an interface to these device drivers. This will benefit both users and writers of device drivers by providing a uniform model of communication between application software and device drivers.
New IEEE Standard – Inactive-Reserved. This standard is part of the POSIX series of standards. It defines an application program interface for controlling device drivers. Although it is based on the widely used ioctl() system call, the interface is type-safe and has a fixed number of parameters.
